[Foxx]

These hands are from the NLM Pairs at this weekend's sectional in San Diego. We came in second to the same pair in both sessions, and would have been likely to win the whole thing if my opening leads hadn't been a disaster. Get these right, and you can win a sectional, too!

All hands are matchpoints scoring.

(1)

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(2)

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(3)

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[Phil]

1. ♣A. It pays off big when we can get a ruff or cash a few clubs, or can make a successful switch. It wrong when we didn't guess the right pointed suit to lead.

2. ♠K. I doubt everyone is overcalling with our hand (although most around here would), so I think we are ahead of the field. I do not want to blow a trick, which is what the ♣Q might do.

3. ♣Q I guess but everything sucks.

[BunnyGo]

1) Ugh...either the 2 of spades, 2 of diamonds or A of clubs. I'll go with the Ace of clubs. It's unlikely to blow a trick, the danger is just setting up a suit in dummy for pitches...oh well if it fails.

2) I'm leading a trump. I agree with Phil that I don't want to blow a trick. They may be able to pitch spades on diamonds, but I'd rather cut down on ruffs (this hand sounds distributional) before they get too many.

3) I'll lead the spade king. The heart or club could easily be the better suit to attack, but I'll hope to hit partner with 4 or 5 spades to the A or J.

[nigel_k]

1. ♣A
2. ♠K
3. ♥10

[wyman]

♣A
♠4 (3/5)
♥10

[BunnyGo]

wyman, on 2011-August-07, 20:29, said:

♠4 (3/5)

Is this really the time to be making a length lead? Partner might think you're looking to get a ruff.

[rogerclee]

1) CA seems automatic, either it wins immediately or we switch intelligently.
2) King of spades seems most flexible, since I might be able to shift to a club or a trump if that looks right, and leading something else risks losing a spade trick if we have one. My second choice is a club, not a trump.
3) This is pretty hard, a heart lead is risky when we have this much strength, but I think we have to try it. The queen of clubs could easily be right and I don't have any problem with it. A spade is not very reasonable, way too much downside.

[Foxx]

(1) After thinking about this for a long time, I decided to lead . . . . . . a diamond. Oops:

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The good news is that we still beat it one. The bad news is, had I led the ♣A we would have beaten it three. Hats off to the ♣A leaders, they got it right. In a lifetime of leading a doubleton ace, I've never hit the king in partner's hand, so of course, the one time I don't lead the doubleton ace, partner is there with the K.

(2) This one is kind of unfair to all of you (and me) because partner didn't give me help:

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I led the ♠5, only a spade lead lets the contract make. A trump lead beats it one, while a minor-suit lead beats it two. After the hand, partner admitted she made a bad bid, and should have bid 3♦ to direct my lead. All the ♠K leaders can at least take consolation in the fact that they prevented the ♠10 from winning a trick.

(3) They say there are no blind opening leads, only deaf opening leaders. Well, I may as well have been both:

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I reasoned that diamonds would be breaking badly for declarer and that the right idea would be to not give away any tricks. Therefore, I led the ♣Q. South now had ten tricks, and due to a signaling mix-up on the run of the diamonds, ended up making five. A heart lead gives up making five immediately. Only a spade lead does the job. If you told me that dummy would hit with ♠J9x, I would never lead a spade. Never mind that 5♦ is a laydown, no matter what the lead.

[BunnyGo]

Woohoo! I got leads correct for once! Hurray for resulting!

Very interesting hands. Congratulations on the 2nd place finish. Good luck getting 1st next time.

[JLOGIC]

I think the club ace is a completely horrible lead, almost LOL worthy.

On the other hand I think a spade is a better lead than a diamond. You do have the diamond 9, on the other hand RHO could probably have 4 diamonds (6-4) much more frequently than they have 4 spades, and leading RHO's side suit is probably bad. I am not sure how strong this reasoning is, but I tend to use it in these kind of situations, it is probably pretty random between the 2 overall.

[BunnyGo]

JLOGIC, on 2011-August-09, 01:33, said:

I think the club ace is a completely horrible lead, almost LOL worthy.

You think it's too likely to set up pitches and not likely enough to find a useful ruff? Is there another reason it's LOL worthy?

[JLOGIC]

BunnyGo, on 2011-August-09, 00:28, said:

Woohoo! I got leads correct for once! Hurray for resulting!

Very interesting hands. Congratulations on the 2nd place finish. Good luck getting 1st next time.

Congrats, you made the non-obvious "expert" choice on every hand that was posted as a lead problem on an internet bridge forum

Just kidding, but it does bias everything. When hands are posted like this, I would say conservatively at least 90 % of the time the correct answer would have been "Club ace, SK" for hands 1 and 3 and 100 % of the time a non spade is the winner on hand 2. I am obv not saying that you were disingenuous about what you would lead, many people would lead those things at least on hands 1 and 3, but it is worth keeping in mind that it might subconsciously bias you.

I still think it's a huge problem for people who read a lot more bridge than they play, they get a disproportionate view of how often a reverse is a fake reverse, how often a 1N opener contains stiff K of spades, how often the non normal hand specific lead is right, etc vs how often normal things work/are happening. I only mention this because I think some people have forum/master solvers syndrome when they play actual bridge and it affects them. I have no idea if this is true of you or not and am not trying to say it is, just that it's something to look out for. Normal things are normal for a reason, they usually work. And when that happens, they don't make it to the forums!

[JLOGIC]

BunnyGo, on 2011-August-09, 01:35, said:

You think it's too likely to set up pitches and not likely enough to find a useful ruff? Is there another reason it's LOL worthy?

Sure, we have queens and often times the best course of action will be to set them up. We also have 5 card suits and an ace, perhaps we will need that entry later to do something (like give partner a ruff, lead through dummy, etc). We also have ace TEN, that is a particularly bad holding to lead from since there is more risk of blowing up the suit, and if we do have a ruff coming sometimes we will often still get the trick, often RHO will have a doubleton also so we won't get our ruff AND we will set up their suit, etc. We also have a stiff trump, so we never have the added upside of partner getting in with a hypothetical trump ace and giving us a ruff when he doesn't have the CK.

And yes, as simple as clee makes it out to be, we will sometimes get the trick 2 defense wrong. We might not know whether to try for the ruff or not (we don't know if RHO has 2 or 3). We might not be able to read the signal. It might be unclear what suit to shift to if RHO has a side card but we're not sure where. And by the way, how many of you play ace from ace king? Good luck to you if so, partner will really have no idea how to signal (side note, if you want to play ace from ace king, don't do it on auctions where you are likely to bang down an unsupported ace such as this one).

And of course if LHO does have good clubs, wasting that tempo will often be a crucial loss, helping declarer set up his suit before we set up ours...that is why we usually lead our long suits.

Yes, this is a good auction to lead an ace since RHO is less likely to have strength (like the king), and more likely to have shortness in other suits, especially if you have two of them, or if you have one completely empty suit (as dummy might have a lot of pitches on that suit). In fact this theme is extremely common in bridge literature. But here we have queens which not only stop the likelihood of declarer having pitches a lot, they also increase the chance of us setting up something. I would say if I could set up a hand that was wrong to lead from Ax on this auction that didn't have a side sequence, it would be exactly AT doubleton, exactly a stiff trump, and exactly a king or queen fifth on the side in the other suits.

We really have little to fear here and have 2 awesome leads. Sure it will suck when they cash the AK of the suit we lead, and pitch a club loser...oh well. Maybe they had a loser in our other queen suit also, so it didn't cost. It is just such specific layouts that we are catering to when we lead the club ace with this hand. I think it's truly terrible. And I would guess that Clee would agree with me when I say I bang down unsupported aces more than 99 % of experts, so I'm not always just against the concept of it.

[JLOGIC]

PS your partner is right regarding hand 2. Playing matchpoints she has to get a diamond lead in. Not to mention there could easily be a diamond slam, or partner might need to compete to 5S if they have long diamonds, etc, so it is right for non lead purposes also. . If you play 3D as non forcing then I think she should bid 4D fit. If you play 3D as forcing that is perfect.

But seriously you can't beat yourself up for leading a spade of all things on this auction. The most likely scenario for a non spade lead is that the opp gets to pitch their spade away on something. And really what is the risk? That partner has jumped to 4S with 3 small, and RHO competed with AQx or Qx or Ax and dummy has the other honor? That is just extremely unlikely, some might say impossible. We can argue about hand 1, but I think if you are not leading a spade on hand 2 you are overthinking everything and bridge is too hard.

Sorry for spamming/triple posting your thread. You are not supposed to get everything right, you're just supposed to play good percentage bridge and realize that most of the time that won't be good enough to win (for anybody).

[BunnyGo]

JLOGIC, on 2011-August-09, 01:46, said:

Just kidding, but it does bias everything. When hands are posted like this, I would say conservatively at least 90 % of the time the correct answer would have been "Club ace, SK" for hands 1 and 3 and 100 % of the time a non spade is the winner on hand 2. I am obv not saying that you were disingenuous about what you would lead, many people would lead those things at least on hands 1 and 3, but it is worth keeping in mind that it might subconsciously bias you.

I agree. I tried hard to consider what I would actually do and not take advantage of that knowledge. I have no idea if I succeeded or not.

Quote

I still think it's a huge problem for people who read a lot more bridge than they play, they get a disproportionate view of how often a reverse is a fake reverse, how often a 1N opener contains stiff K of spades, how often the non normal hand specific lead is right, etc vs how often normal things work/are happening. I only mention this because I think some people have forum/master solvers syndrome when they play actual bridge and it affects them. I have no idea if this is true of you or not and am not trying to say it is, just that it's something to look out for. Normal things are normal for a reason, they usually work. And when that happens, they don't make it to the forums!

Absolutely. I don't actually know if I'm good at leading or not (even for my level of play).


Whether or not I suffer from the symptom of "master solvering" it's always a good reminder that at least 9/10 hands (probably even 99/100) require little brilliance, just no mistakes.

[awm]

My experience of the "normal" leads on these hands may be a bit different than Justin's.

In particular, I have not found leading a spade on hands like #2 to be particularly effective. Most of the time we won't have more than one spade trick on this auction, and we only have a spade trick if partner holds the ace and neither opponent is void. Our spade trick is not that likely to go away if we have one, so the spade lead only really wins if partner can take the first trick and can more easily tell which minor to switch to (won't be easy if he has Kxxx in both suits or the like). I think I'd have lead a club there.

On #3, a club lead is relying on partner to have ♣A or ♣K, whereas a spade lead relies on partner to have ♠A or ♠J. Given the apparent strength of the opposing hands and the fact that RHO did open clubs, it's probably a lot more likely to find partner with a spade card. The one advantage to a club lead is that we can potentially cash a lot of tricks there if the suit establishes, but I think that is rather an illusion. The problem is that if partner has a top club he's unlikely to have another useful card as well. So we can count opponents for probably 6♦, 1♣, 1♠, 2♥ = ten tricks. If partner has the spade ace we can hold them to ten tricks at most (often fewer) and if partner has the spade jack he might well have another control which could allow us to set the contract.

On the first one I agree that ♣A is kind of a shot in the dark.

[JLOGIC]

I agree a club is not good on hand 3, I think a heart (my longest and strongest unbid suit!) is the best and also normal lead. Partner could have the jack, king, or ace, and even when he has no honor we will break even if dummy has HJ, or if RHO has AK doubleton, or if dummy has stiff A or K, or if the opps are 2-2, etc.

Also, when partner has the spade ace, it could easily be unneccessary to have to lead spades immediately, we have clubs and hearts locked up and we have a stiff diamond, there is a reasonable chance they cannnot run diamonds. Lots of things can happen obviously, but a spade just seems unneccessarily heroic.

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Our spade trick is not that likely to go away if we have one, so the spade lead only really wins if partner can take the first trick and can more easily tell which minor to switch to (won't be easy if he has Kxxx in both suits or the like). I think I'd have lead a club there.

Why is our spade trick(s) not likely to go away? Partner, as far as we can tell, has preempted. We have 2 small diamonds, and if they need to set up clubs they will set up. On top of that you are leading a club from QJx...so a spade is better than that whenever you just blow a club trick. I feel like maybe you didn't notice it was matchpoints with your analysis here, your post makes a lot more sense to me at imps.

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So we can count opponents for probably 6♦, 1♣, 1♠, 2♥ = ten tricks.

Etc etc, thinking like this is extremely dangerous to me, similar to your analysis of a spade lead on the first hand, why can we count on all of these things, why are we basing everything we do off of these big generalizations. It is like how whereagles always posts "partners most likely shape is x, because my shape is y, so I will bid accordingly..." There is an obvious flaw to that line of thought.

To me if you want to analyze leading a spade vs leading the CQ on hand 2 you should simply think:

"A spade lead gains in these situations, and loses in these situations" and
"The CQ gains on these situations, and loses on these situations"

and then figure out the likelihood of each. Saying the spade lead rarely gains so you lead the CQ is an incomplete analysis, it rarely loses also and in my mind can pretty easily gain.

Even this is a dangerous way to think when all we see is 13 cards, we simply don't have enough information on this auction in my opinion to be thinking so specifically. For instance, passive leads are usually too abstract to say "we will win on THESE layouts" but leading something like AQx vs 3N is not, it's easy to see when it will gain, so in general people who think that way make a really aggressive lead. Especially at MP, this seems like a bad idea

[xxhong]

I would go wrong on the first two. I think D lead is actually a pretty good one. Preempters tend to hold short S more often than D I think.
On the second one, you partner may help by showing his D suit.
On the third one, SK is certainly a very good lead and it is the lead that I'd like to choose if LHO has a very long diamond suit to cash.

Foxx, on 2011-August-09, 00:12, said:

(1) After thinking about this for a long time, I decided to lead . . . . . . a diamond. Oops:

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The good news is that we still beat it one. The bad news is, had I led the ♣A we would have beaten it three. Hats off to the ♣A leaders, they got it right. In a lifetime of leading a doubleton ace, I've never hit the king in partner's hand, so of course, the one time I don't lead the doubleton ace, partner is there with the K.

(2) This one is kind of unfair to all of you (and me) because partner didn't give me help:

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I led the ♠5, only a spade lead lets the contract make. A trump lead beats it one, while a minor-suit lead beats it two. After the hand, partner admitted she made a bad bid, and should have bid 3♦ to direct my lead. All the ♠K leaders can at least take consolation in the fact that they prevented the ♠10 from winning a trick.

(3) They say there are no blind opening leads, only deaf opening leaders. Well, I may as well have been both:

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I reasoned that diamonds would be breaking badly for declarer and that the right idea would be to not give away any tricks. Therefore, I led the ♣Q. South now had ten tricks, and due to a signaling mix-up on the run of the diamonds, ended up making five. A heart lead gives up making five immediately. Only a spade lead does the job. If you told me that dummy would hit with ♠J9x, I would never lead a spade. Never mind that 5♦ is a laydown, no matter what the lead.

[whereagles]

1. Anything can work well/bad, but I think I'd try the ♣A. With some luck I'll know what to do next.

2. Seems like it's time for one of those unsupported king leads. Thus ♠K and, again, with some luck I'll know what to do next.

3. Yuck. Pard should be next to broke. I'll try my luck with the systemic heart, as clubs rate to be into declarer's suit.

[whereagles]

Saw outcome.

In 2 pard misbid. His call is 4♦, not 4♠.